Well, my website is back up. For how long, I cannot say. If you didn’t notice it was down… It was. Quite broken. It’s been kind of sketchy for some time, and after my Big Christmas Upgrade of 2019, it finally just “went away.” No errors, just a shiny white page where my years and years (hours and hours? minutes and minutes?) of work were previously displayed. A good bit of ciphering later, it came back. It seems to have something to do with rebooting my fancy web server. The optimal resolution here would seem to be “never, ever reboot,” but unfortunately that just isn’t quite practical.

And what else have we been doing, outside of learning to restore sql databases? Well, not a whole lot. Shipping out some Christmas presents, getting a few Christmas presents, the holiday norm. Saturday I got the always-exciting joy of firing up my smoker and cooking the Christmas briskets. I went with a new plan, and for once it worked out. That afternoon we joined some friends for a big-screen showing of Christmas Vacation at a nearby theater, and after that around town for some generic holiday cheer. When we got home in the early evening, I fired up the smoker, put on two briskets… And went to bed. Gasp. I am starting to get enough faith in that thing that it can be left unattended for quite some period of time. Naturally, I woke up around 3:00 in a mad panic that the holiday meal was ruined, but upon dashing outside in my shorts and bare feet found it quite steadily cooking away. Indeed, it ran just fine until around 8:30, when it finally ran out of fuel. Like magic, I tell ya’. Initial sampling of the brisket indicates positive results, I’ll be hoping for the best Wednesday at dinner.